In recent years, measuring the thickness of the skin has played an increasingly important role in the medical field, since experimental evidence has shown a correlation between abnormal values of the skin thickness and several diseases or disorders.
In particular, a skin thickness exceeding reference values is confirmed to be correlated with rheumatic diseases such as, for example, sclerodermia.
Moreover, a correlation between skin thickness and mutations in the GJB2 gene has been found, which is in turn correlated to hearing loss, as shown in document WO 2009/08056A2.
The use of ultrasounds for measuring skin thickness is known and is fraught with technical difficulties mainly due to two aspects.
The first aspect relates to the deformability of the skin under the pressure of an ultrasound probe, which can cause the skin under examination to be locally compressed, thus resulting in underestimated values or more generally in values different than the real value.
The second aspect relates to the measurement being taken along an axis perpendicular to the skin surface to achieve a real evaluation, since a measurement taken along axes inclined at angles different than the axis perpendicular to the skin surface may result in overestimated values or again generally in values different than the real value.
The same considerations are to be considered as valid even when the object to be measured is a biological tissue different than the skin.
Known methods and devices, such as for example those described in the above mentioned document WO 2009/08056A2, do not completely solve the above mentioned drawbacks, because they try reaching a compromise between the minimum compression of the skin on the one hand and the orthogonality between probe and skin on the other hand, by means of optical and inclinometric sensors that considerably increase hardware complexity and the computational burden affecting software components without guaranteeing optimal results.